In December 2019 Ancient Origins reported that Dr. Joseph Saleh, an aerospace engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, had published a study in the online journal Nature...
Ghost sickness is the belief that ghosts are able to cause a living person to fall ill. This particular term is used by the Native Americans, especially amongst the Navajo people. Nevertheless, this...
Death always held great significance amongst the ancient cultures of the world. For many, death was a gateway into a new and different life in the underworld that was governed by the gods of death (...
The Aghori are followers of a Hindu sect believed to be 1000 years old. These ascetics are often regarded as sadhus (Sanskrit for ‘good/holy man’), and have devoted their entire lives to the...
Forever intertwined, Morana, goddess of winter and death, and Vesna, goddess of spring and rebirth, could not exist without each other. However, they could not possibly exist in the same place at the...
Immurement is a practice whereby a person is enclosed within a confined space with no exits. Normally, a person who is immured is left in that space till he/she dies, either of dehydration or...
Public order in ancient Rome was a priority for the elite, who contrived a range of gruesome punishments for purportedly serious crimes deserving the death penalty. As a result, a day of fun and...
When one of us began studying psychology he was told that if the aim was to understand human relationships, it would be better served by studying literature—especially Shakespeare. Since then, at...
78,000 years ago someone buried a young child in a cave. Now, researchers say that child’s grave in Kenya is the earliest known example of a deliberate human burial by modern humans in Africa. The...
Researchers have established that Northern Ireland’s most famous Egyptian mummy was murdered. The mummy, which is the cadaver of a woman called Takabuti who lived 2,600 years ago, is now known to...
The cycle of life and death is an eternal and unchanging truth of human history. Yet, the attitudes around both are influenced and shaped by a number of factors. Today, dying of old age is seen as a...
The Valsgärde burial field near Uppsala in Sweden is known for its magnificent boat graves from the 600s and 700s AD. Archaeologists have identified more than 90 graves from the Iron Age, but two...
When it comes to ancient Egypt and its long lasting and influential civilization, plenty of its unique characteristics can seem peculiar and otherworldly. Sure, it is no secret that ancient Egypt was...
‘Lockdown’ is a word we now see on a daily basis as the 2020 coronavirus pandemic requires limiting the movements and activities of communities during the mass quarantine of most of the world’s...
Doomed to forever roll a huge boulder up a steep hill, Sisyphus is a figure in Greek mythology who represents an impossible task. As his punishment in the Greek Underworld , each time Sisyphus neared...
A new study suggests that Europe has been ‘global’ for over a millennium. The evidence for this claim comes from a set of shared cultural practices spread over a wide area in early Medieval Europe...
Royal courts were always a hotspot for intrigues, secrets, schemes, and love affairs. Where prestige and power reign, true love is often nowhere to be found. But in those cases when royal passions...
Israeli archaeologists excavating in Jaffa have made further discoveries beneath the streets of this ancient Greek settlement, but this time, they’ve discovered a baby’s skeleton buried in a jar!...
A naturally mummified man was found to have had a grasshopper diet for several months before he died. His body was found in 1937 when a young man called Guy Skiles was exploring in a rock-shelter...
Excavators in Cyprus have discovered a series of “sensational finds” of death cult artifacts dating to 3,500 years ago, during the Bronze Age. A vessel used as a cult funerary object, a seal with...
In days of old, the dead were buried with a silver coin (the shiner the better) so that the souls of the faithful departed could pay the toll to the deathless demon ferryman of the underworld: Charon...
Ancient beliefs are often a complex puzzle and putting the pieces together can often be extremely challenging. Time has its way with unwritten traditions, and little of what wasn’t written down...
The technical sophistication of the Middle Ages tends to be underestimated. Near the end of the High Middle Ages, mechanical technology such as clocks and water mills, for example, were becoming...
It’s official. Ireland – the home of Halloween traditions – has banned Halloween parties and traditional trick-or-treating festivities this year as tackling Covid-19 remains top of government’s...
